OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
EndoSparse: Real-Time Sparse View Synthesis of Endoscopic Scenes using Gaussian Splatting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

3D reconstruction of biological tissues from a collection of endoscopic images is a key to unlock various important downstream surgical applications with 3D capabilities. Existing methods employ various advanced neural rendering techniques for photorealistic view synthesis, but they often struggle to recover accurate 3D representations when only sparse observations are available, which is usually the case in real-world clinical scenarios. To tackle this {sparsity} challenge, we propose a framework leveraging the prior knowledge from multiple foundation models during the reconstruction process, dubbed as \textit{EndoSparse}. Experimental results indicate that our proposed strategy significantly improves the geometric and appearance quality under challenging sparse-view conditions, including using only three views. In rigorous benchmarking experiments against state-of-the-art methods, \textit{EndoSparse} achieves superior results in terms of accurate geometry, realistic appearance, and rendering efficiency, confirming the robustness to sparse-view limitations in endoscopic reconstruction. \textit{EndoSparse} signifies a steady step towards the practical deployment of neural 3D reconstruction in real-world clinical scenarios. Project page: https://endo-sparse.github.io/.
PocketLLM: Enabling On-Device Fine-Tuning for Personalized LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have indeed showcased their impressive capabilities. On mobile devices, the wealth of valuable, non-public data generated daily holds great promise for locally fine-tuning personalized LLMs, while maintaining privacy through on-device processing. However, the constraints of mobile device resources pose challenges to direct on-device LLM fine-tuning, mainly due to the memory-intensive nature of derivative-based optimization required for saving gradients and optimizer states. To tackle this, we propose employing derivative-free optimization techniques to enable on-device fine-tuning of LLM, even on memory-limited mobile devices. Empirical results demonstrate that the RoBERTa-large model and OPT-1.3B can be fine-tuned locally on the OPPO Reno 6 smartphone using around 4GB and 6.5GB of memory respectively, using derivative-free optimization techniques. This highlights the feasibility of on-device LLM fine-tuning on mobile devices, paving the way for personalized LLMs on resource-constrained devices while safeguarding data privacy.
Evolutionary Morphology Towards Overconstrained Locomotion via Large-Scale, Multi-Terrain Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained locomotion from a design and learning perspective inspired by evolutionary morphology, aiming to integrate the concept of `intelligent design under constraints' - hereafter referred to as constraint-driven design intelligence - in developing modern robotic limbs with superior energy efficiency. We propose a 3D-printable design of robotic limbs parametrically reconfigurable as a classical planar 4-bar linkage, an overconstrained Bennett linkage, and a spherical 4-bar linkage. These limbs adopt a co-axial actuation, identical to the modern legged robot platforms, with the added capability of upgrading into a wheel-legged system. Then, we implemented a large-scale, multi-terrain deep reinforcement learning framework to train these reconfigurable limbs for a comparative analysis of overconstrained locomotion in energy efficiency. Results show that the overconstrained limbs exhibit more efficient locomotion than planar limbs during forward and sideways walking over different terrains, including floors, slopes, and stairs, with or without random noises, by saving at least 22% mechanical energy in completing the traverse task, with the spherical limbs being the least efficient. It also achieves the highest average speed of 0.85 meters per second on flat terrain, which is 20% faster than the planar limbs. This study paves the path for an exciting direction for future research in overconstrained robotics leveraging evolutionary morphology and reconfigurable mechanism intelligence when combined with state-of-the-art methods in deep reinforcement learning.
BERGEN: A Benchmarking Library for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Retrieval-Augmented Generation allows to enhance Large Language Models with external knowledge. In response to the recent popularity of generative LLMs, many RAG approaches have been proposed, which involve an intricate number of different configurations such as evaluation datasets, collections, metrics, retrievers, and LLMs. Inconsistent benchmarking poses a major challenge in comparing approaches and understanding the impact of each component in the pipeline. In this work, we study best practices that lay the groundwork for a systematic evaluation of RAG and present BERGEN, an end-to-end library for reproducible research standardizing RAG experiments. In an extensive study focusing on QA, we benchmark different state-of-the-art retrievers, rerankers, and LLMs. Additionally, we analyze existing RAG metrics and datasets. Our open-source library BERGEN is available under \url{https://github.com/naver/bergen}.
SecGenAI: Enhancing Security of Cloud-based Generative AI Applications within Australian Critical Technologies of National Interest
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies offers transformative opportunities within Australia's critical technologies of national interest while introducing unique security challenges. This paper presents SecGenAI, a comprehensive security framework for cloud-based GenAI applications, with a focus on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. SecGenAI addresses functional, infrastructure, and governance requirements, integrating end-to-end security analysis to generate specifications emphasizing data privacy, secure deployment, and shared responsibility models. Aligned with Australian Privacy Principles, AI Ethics Principles, and guidelines from the Australian Cyber Security Centre and Digital Transformation Agency, SecGenAI mitigates threats such as data leakage, adversarial attacks, and model inversion. The framework's novel approach combines advanced machine learning techniques with robust security measures, ensuring compliance with Australian regulations while enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of GenAI systems. This research contributes to the field of intelligent systems by providing actionable strategies for secure GenAI implementation in industry, fostering innovation in AI applications, and safeguarding national interests.
Wind Estimation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Causal Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this work we demonstrate the possibility of estimating the wind environment of a UAV without specialised sensors, using only the UAV's trajectory, applying a causal machine learning approach. We implement the causal curiosity method which combines machine learning times series classification and clustering with a causal framework. We analyse three distinct wind environments: constant wind, shear wind, and turbulence, and explore different optimisation strategies for optimal UAV manoeuvres to estimate the wind conditions. The proposed approach can be used to design optimal trajectories in challenging weather conditions, and to avoid specialised sensors that add to the UAV's weight and compromise its functionality.
Some Remarks on First-Order Definable Tree Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2024
Year: 2024

We study the question of whether a given regular language of finite trees can be defined in first-order logic. We develop an algebraic approach to address this question and we use it to derive several necessary and sufficient conditions for definability (but unfortunately no condition that is both). The main difference of our results to those from the literature is that our conditions are decidable.
General collections demography model with multiple risks
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This note presents an Agent-Based Model (ABM) with Monte Carlo sampling, designed to simulate the behaviour of a population of objects over time. The model incorporates damage functions with the risk parameters of the ABC framework to simulate adverse events. As a result, it combines continuous and probabilistic degradation. This hybrid approach allows us to study the emergent behavior of the system and explore the range of possible lifetimes of a collection. The main outcome of the model is the decay in condition of a collection as a consequence of all the combined degradation processes. The model is based on six hypotheses that are described for further testing. This paper presents a first attempt at an universal implementation of Collections Demography principles, with the hope that it will generate discussion and the identification of research gaps.
Efficient Cutting Tool Wear Segmentation Based on Segment Anything Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Tool wear conditions impact the surface quality of the workpiece and its final geometric precision. In this research, we propose an efficient tool wear segmentation approach based on Segment Anything Model, which integrates U-Net as an automated prompt generator to streamline the processes of tool wear detection. Our evaluation covered three Point-of-Interest generation methods and further investigated the effects of variations in training dataset sizes and U-Net training intensities on resultant wear segmentation outcomes. The results consistently highlight our approach's advantage over U-Net, emphasizing its ability to achieve accurate wear segmentation even with limited training datasets. This feature underscores its potential applicability in industrial scenarios where datasets may be limited.
Fast and Efficient: Mask Neural Fields for 3D Scene Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding 3D scenes is a crucial challenge in computer vision research with applications spanning multiple domains. Recent advancements in distilling 2D vision-language foundation models into neural fields, like NeRF and 3DGS, enable open-vocabulary segmentation of 3D scenes from 2D multi-view images without the need for precise 3D annotations. However, while effective, these methods typically rely on the per-pixel distillation of high-dimensional CLIP features, introducing ambiguity and necessitating complex regularization strategies, which adds inefficiency during training. This paper presents MaskField, which enables efficient 3D open-vocabulary segmentation with neural fields from a novel perspective. Unlike previous methods, MaskField decomposes the distillation of mask and semantic features from foundation models by formulating a mask feature field and queries. MaskField overcomes ambiguous object boundaries by naturally introducing SAM segmented object shapes without extra regularization during training. By circumventing the direct handling of dense high-dimensional CLIP features during training, MaskField is particularly compatible with explicit scene representations like 3DGS. Our extensive experiments show that MaskField not only surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods but also achieves remarkably fast convergence. We hope that MaskField will inspire further exploration into how neural fields can be trained to comprehend 3D scenes from 2D models.
Physics-Inspired Deep Learning and Transferable Models for Bridge Scour Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces scour physics-inspired neural networks (SPINNs), a hybrid physics-data-driven framework for bridge scour prediction using deep learning. SPINNs integrate physics-based, empirical equations into deep neural networks and are trained using site-specific historical scour monitoring data. Long-short Term Memory Network (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are considered as the base deep learning (DL) models. We also explore transferable/general models, trained by aggregating datasets from a cluster of bridges, versus the site/bridge-specific models. Despite variation in performance, SPINNs outperformed pure data-driven models in the majority of cases. In some bridge cases, SPINN reduced forecasting errors by up to 50 percent. The pure data-driven models showed better transferability compared to hybrid models. The transferable DL models particularly proved effective for bridges with limited data. In addition, the calibrated time-dependent empirical equations derived from SPINNs showed great potential for maximum scour depth estimation, providing more accurate predictions compared to commonly used HEC-18 model. Comparing SPINNs with traditional empirical models indicates substantial improvements in scour prediction accuracy. This study can pave the way for further exploration of physics-inspired machine learning methods for scour prediction.
Capacity-Maximizing Input Symbol Selection for Discrete Memoryless Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Motivated by communication systems with constrained complexity, we consider the problem of input symbol selection for discrete memoryless channels (DMCs). Given a DMC, the goal is to find a subset of its input alphabet, so that the optimal input distribution that is only supported on these symbols maximizes the capacity among all other subsets of the same size (or smaller). We observe that the resulting optimization problem is non-concave and non-submodular, and so generic methods for such cases do not have theoretical guarantees. We derive an analytical upper bound on the capacity loss when selecting a subset of input symbols based only on the properties of the transition matrix of the channel. We propose a selection algorithm that is based on input-symbols clustering, and an appropriate choice of representatives for each cluster, which uses the theoretical bound as a surrogate objective function. We provide numerical experiments to support the findings.
Generalized Orbicular (m,n,o) T-Spherical Fuzzy Sets with Hamacher Aggregation Operators and Application to Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance uncertainty representation, offering decision-makers a more comprehensive perspective for improved decision-making outcomes. We propose Generalized Orbicular (m,n,o) T-Spherical Fuzzy Set (GO-TSFS), a flexible extension of existing fuzzy set models including Globular T-spherical fuzzy sets (G-TSFSs), T-spherical fuzzy sets (T-SFSs), (p,q,r) Spherical fuzzy sets, and (p,q) Quasirung orthopair fuzzy sets (QOFSs). The framework employs three adjustable parameters m, n, and o to finely tune the influence of membership degrees, allowing for adaptable weighting of various degrees of membership. By utilizing spheres to represent membership, indeterminacy, and non-membership levels, the model enhances accuracy in depicting vague, ambiguous, and imprecise data. Building upon the foundation of GO-TSFSs, we introduce essential set operations and algebraic operations for GO-TSF Values (GO-TSFVs). Moreover, we also develop score functions, accuracy functions, and basic distance measures such as Hamming and Euclidean distances to further enhance the analytical capabilities of the framework. Additionally, we propose GO-TSF Hamacher Weighted Averaging (GO-TSFHWA) and GO-TSFH Weighted Geometric (GO-TSFHWG), aggregation operators tailored for our proposed sets. To demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach, we apply our proposed aggregation operators namely GO-TSFHWA and GO-TSFHWG to solve a Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making (MCGDM) problem, specifically for selecting the most suitable e-commerce online shopping platform from the top-rated options. Sensitivity analysis is also conducted to validate the reliability and efficacy of our results, affirming the utility and robustness of the proposed methodology in real-world decision-making scenarios.
Show Less, Instruct More: Enriching Prompts with Definitions and Guidelines for Zero-Shot NER
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, several specialized instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) for Named Entity Recognition (NER) have emerged. Compared to traditional NER approaches, these models have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities. Existing LLMs primarily focus on addressing zero-shot NER on Out-of-Domain inputs, while fine-tuning on an extensive number of entity classes that often highly or completely overlap with test sets. In this work instead, we propose SLIMER, an approach designed to tackle never-seen-before entity tags by instructing the model on fewer examples, and by leveraging a prompt enriched with definition and guidelines. Experiments demonstrate that definition and guidelines yield better performance, faster and more robust learning, particularly when labelling unseen named entities. Furthermore, SLIMER performs comparably to state-of-the-art approaches in out-of-domain zero-shot NER, while being trained in a more fair, though certainly more challenging, setting.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Actionable Course Evaluation Student Feedback to Lecturers
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

End of semester student evaluations of teaching are the dominant mechanism for providing feedback to academics on their teaching practice. For large classes, however, the volume of feedback makes these tools impractical for this purpose. This paper explores the use of open-source generative AI to synthesise factual, actionable and appropriate summaries of student feedback from these survey responses. In our setup, we have 742 student responses ranging over 75 courses in a Computer Science department. For each course, we synthesise a summary of the course evaluations and actionable items for the instructor. Our results reveal a promising avenue for enhancing teaching practices in the classroom setting. Our contribution lies in demonstrating the feasibility of using generative AI to produce insightful feedback for teachers, thus providing a cost-effective means to support educators' development. Overall, our work highlights the possibility of using generative AI to produce factual, actionable, and appropriate feedback for teachers in the classroom setting.
Energy-Aware Decentralized Learning with Intermittent Model Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Decentralized learning (DL) offers a powerful framework where nodes collaboratively train models without sharing raw data and without the coordination of a central server. In the iterative rounds of DL, models are trained locally, shared with neighbors in the topology, and aggregated with other models received from neighbors. Sharing and merging models contribute to convergence towards a consensus model that generalizes better across the collective data captured at training time. In addition, the energy consumption while sharing and merging model parameters is negligible compared to the energy spent during the training phase. Leveraging this fact, we present SkipTrain, a novel DL algorithm, which minimizes energy consumption in decentralized learning by strategically skipping some training rounds and substituting them with synchronization rounds. These training-silent periods, besides saving energy, also allow models to better mix and finally produce models with superior accuracy than typical DL algorithms that train at every round. Our empirical evaluations with 256 nodes demonstrate that SkipTrain reduces energy consumption by 50% and increases model accuracy by up to 12% compared to D-PSGD, the conventional DL algorithm.
Leveraging Speaker Embeddings in End-to-End Neural Diarization for Two-Speaker Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

End-to-end neural speaker diarization systems are able to address the speaker diarization task while effectively handling speech overlap. This work explores the incorporation of speaker information embeddings into the end-to-end systems to enhance the speaker discriminative capabilities, while maintaining their overlap handling strengths. To achieve this, we propose several methods for incorporating these embeddings along the acoustic features. Furthermore, we delve into an analysis of the correct handling of silence frames, the window length for extracting speaker embeddings and the transformer encoder size. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is thoroughly evaluated on the CallHome dataset for the two-speaker diarization task, with results that demonstrate a significant reduction in diarization error rates achieving a relative improvement of a 10.78% compared to the baseline end-to-end model.
CSFNet: A Cosine Similarity Fusion Network for Real-Time RGB-X Semantic Segmentation of Driving Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic segmentation, as a crucial component of complex visual interpretation, plays a fundamental role in autonomous vehicle vision systems. Recent studies have significantly improved the accuracy of semantic segmentation by exploiting complementary information and developing multimodal methods. Despite the gains in accuracy, multimodal semantic segmentation methods suffer from high computational complexity and low inference speed. Therefore, it is a challenging task to implement multimodal methods in driving applications. To address this problem, we propose the Cosine Similarity Fusion Network (CSFNet) as a real-time RGB-X semantic segmentation model. Specifically, we design a Cosine Similarity Attention Fusion Module (CS-AFM) that effectively rectifies and fuses features of two modalities. The CS-AFM module leverages cross-modal similarity to achieve high generalization ability. By enhancing the fusion of cross-modal features at lower levels, CS-AFM paves the way for the use of a single-branch network at higher levels. Therefore, we use dual and single-branch architectures in an encoder, along with an efficient context module and a lightweight decoder for fast and accurate predictions. To verify the effectiveness of CSFNet, we use the Cityscapes, MFNet, and ZJU datasets for the RGB-D/T/P semantic segmentation. According to the results, CSFNet has competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art methods while being state-of-the-art in terms of speed among multimodal semantic segmentation models. It also achieves high efficiency due to its low parameter count and computational complexity. The source code for CSFNet will be available at https://github.com/Danial-Qashqai/CSFNet.